How to Take a Vacation as a Real Estate Agent

The real estate market sleeps for no one. There will always be buyers in waiting, new listings to go over, new potential contacts to meet. But one of the most underrated and neglected topics of discussion is how to take a vacation as a real estate agent.

The key to happiness and longevity in any job is to avoid burnout. If you don’t allow yourself sufficient time off, your life will become nothing else but work. And the quickest way to lose the flame of passion for anything is by doing too much of only it.

When you are truly invested in your work, it can be difficult to overcome the urge to incessantly keep working and growing your business. You see this happening all the time in real estate – whether they’re agents just starting out or those who have been in the business for several years or even decades. They don’t get enough time off and appear overworked, and it inevitably leads to burnout and stress. This then culminates in an increased inability to fulfill clients’ needs and sustain long-term growth.

Because you’re not getting adequate time off you’re not able to be your best self, and so you won’t be equipped to grow your business and help your clients the best that you can.

Anybody can and should take a vacation – from an agent starting out to one who’s been doing it for a couple of years or who manages a big team or a brokerage. The key is to get enough business so that you can start to leverage and outsource some of the activities that don’t give you the greatest return or value on your time.

Hiring Temporary Help

If you’re a solo agent and don’t have anyone else working for you yet, the quick solution is to hire temporary help. Have them take over your shows, your contracts to close, and maybe even some of your prospecting and lead generation while you’re gone. It’s also super easy and straightforward to hire a virtual assistant to do the most simplest, time consuming tasks at a very affordable price. Here are some popular virtual assistant platforms to explore:

TaskRabbit is a great option for finding a hired hand around town to do various jobs.

Upwork can connect you with a swath of potential virtual assistants from around the world.

Hiring an Administrative Assistant

If you’re doing two to three deals or more per month, you should probably be delegating your more menial tasks to an administrative assistant. If you can get that person licensed, even better. Introduce them to your clients early on in the process and tell them upfront that you’ve got administrative support, that you’ve got a team behind you, and introduce them to whomever will be helping them the most. Then that person can start to take over certain tasks, without it appearing as if you’re just handing them off all of a sudden halfway through the process.

Of course you will have to make sure to really train those people well so to be able to effectively help your clients and maintain business. Ideally they should get to the point of being able to take over the day-to-day activities of managing clients. If your team is bigger, you may also have marketing assistants or marketing coordinators to keep up with lead generation efforts while you’re away.

Maintain, but cut back, on prospecting while away.

If your support system or team isn’t big enough yet, you may still have to do a bit of work prospecting while you’re taking time off. This is fine, but make sure to cut back from what you would normally do. For instance if you normally spend three to four hours a day prospecting on the phone, you should be cutting it back to, say, every other day for an hour or two. You never want to quit or fall too behind on prospecting. So ideally have a system and staff in place to manage your prospecting and lead generation while you’re on vacation.

But if you don’t have that infrastructure in place yet, you should work on starting to develop it. That way you can route inbound calls to assistants or key team members while you’re gone. Make sure to give them the authority and responsibility to solve problems for your clients when you’re away.

The key to all this though is to just develop so much business and so many leads that you have the amount of volume and income coming in that you can delegate and hire so that you can take time off, be your best self, and deliver the best results to your clients.

For more advice on how to do this and for dozens of other tips on how to take a small area and dominate it so that you have the resources to implement the systems and hire the people needed to live a balanced life, have a great business, and serve your clients best, see my book “The HyperLocal HyperFast Real Estate Agent” and the Companion Guide as well.